The $date variable is either the document creation date or the date of the remote server depending on what the later returns.
The $modif variable is the date when the document was modified for the last time. Some servers do not return the correct date and do not respond to if-Modified-Since used to query modified documents only. This is common to dynamically generated documents such as CGIs.
When the server returns no or a bogus date, Alkaline will use the first date available or the today's date for either or both of the $modif and the $date variables.
To find out what your server returns, use telnet to connect to it and request a page. Note the Last-Modified and the Date headers in the example below.
$ telnet www.vestris.com 80
Trying 66.33.25.221...
Connected to vestris.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.1
host: www.vestris.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 05 Oct 2001 04:50:25 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) (Red Hat/Linux)
Last-Modified: Mon, 27 Aug 2001 02:23:28 GMT
ETag: "9d371-751-3b89af20"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 1873
Content-Type: text/html
...
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